IT'S THE VIDEO GAMES, DAMNIT!

[Shankapotomus]

37. I disagree

Video games are just a reflection of what is already on our minds as a culture. If anything video games transfer such desires and thoughts in individuals out of the real world into the virtual world. I mean, what are your chances of replicating world domination in the real world? If anything, going through that experience in the safe format of a video game would eventually exhaust your infatuation with such aspirations in the real world. It allows your adolescent mind to grow up within the previously unavailible safe confines of a pixelated screen instead of experimenting with such impulses in real life. Violence, from a behavioral standpoint in video games, of course, reinforces the already competative culture that exists but it is the safest expression of such behavior and thinking because it satisfies such admittedly warped desires without a real life body count.

Here is an additional counter of why videos games are a positive transference of our cultural violence:

If two nations had a choice of settling a dispute by fighting a real war or having representatives of each nation fight the war over an online multiplayer war simulation, with the loser agreeing to concede without any real bloodshed, which option would you choose?